PagerDuty scoops up incident management startup Jeli.io

PagerDuty announced this afternoon that it intends to acquire Jeli.io, an early stage incident management startup. The companies did not share the price.

Jeli was founded in 2019 by Nora Jones, a chaos engineering veteran, who had previously worked at Netflix and Slack. Jones went to work building a company that could help customers figure out what happened when things go wrong with an emphasis on surfacing insights to help the team learn from the incident and know how to react better in the future.

The product includes an incident response bot that works inside of Slack. By answering several questions, you can begin responding to an incident, opening a Jira ticket as needed, and sending the incident report to the appropriate Slack channels to put it in front of the right people.

It’s a set of tools that should come in handy for PagerDuty, which helps customers process issues including incident management, AIOps, automation and customer service. The goal is to provide a range of services from resolving an incident internally to dealing externally with customers, who might be affected by a slow down or outage.

“Incident response is the core tentpole of our Operations Cloud at PagerDuty, which represents many different capabilities all working in concert with one another to really help companies improve their overall operational maturity,” Dan McCalll, VP of product management for incident response told TechCrunch.

Jones says she was not looking to sell, but PagerDuty came along and was such a good match in terms of functionality, and PagerDuty’s resources should allow Jeli to grow much faster than it could have continuing as a stand-alone startup. “I wasn’t looking to sell. I think we have a very healthy business that we’re running, which I think also makes this even more exciting, and so this felt like a really natural step in our business,” she said.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that PagerDuty bought the startup given that the its data is an important source of information that Jeli looks at when assessing an incident, and 90% of its customers use PagerDuty. In fact Jones says that PagerDuty was her company’s first integration.

This past summer Jeli announced it was building a generative AI tool that among other things can help summarize the key points in an incident and generate a report that humans can use as a starting point to analyze what happened.

Jeli raised $19 million before selling today including a $4 million seed in 2020 and a $15 million Series A in September 2022. Most of the 20 or so employees, including Jones, will be joining PagerDuty when the deal closes. Customers include Slack, Zendesk, SentinelOne, F5 and LastPass.

The deal was signed today, but will close at an undisclosed later date.